Everyone needs cloud-savvy administrators, but there aren't enough to go around. Worse still, if someone does come to you and they say they know OpenStack like the back of their hand, how do you know they do? Or, flipping it around, if you're a smart system administrator who wants to pick up mad OpenStack cloud skills, how do you do that?

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If you're not wedded to Red Hat, other OpenStack certification will probably take a similar path. Each one will, of course, be based on its own primary operating system. You can see the future of these certifications forming at the new, non-vendor aligned OpenStack Training Marketplace.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, explained, "There is now a huge demand for OpenStack expertise, so what we want to do is to try and put in place some standards for OpenStack education and training."

At this point the Marketplace is just that, a marketplace for a variety of approved OpenStack training offerings. The current listing includes classes from, among others, The Linux Foundation, Rackspace, and, of course, Red Hat.

This is only a first step. In the next year and a half, the OpenStack Foundation will be working on a more organized series of classes. For now, what's being taught depends entirely on each vendor or organization.

Eventually, once the classes are squared away, Bryce said there will be "a baseline certification for OpenStack. This will be a set of standard tests to evaluate basic, core OpenStack knowledge."

Hopefully, all these efforts will quickly support educational and certification path for OpenStack employers and users. OpenStack is getting too big, too fast to leave implementations in the hands of people who are still figuring it out as they go along.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system; 300bps was a fast Internet connection; WordStar was the state of the art word processor; and we liked it.His work has been published in everything from highly technical publications...
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